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Both the peaty turf and the heather are used for fuel; the heather is pulled up, the turf cut with a particular kind of spade, heart-shaped and pointed, not unlike the traditional spade used by the gravedigger in "Hamlet," but with a very long curved handle. Vipers are sometimes encountered among the heather where it is sandy.
Afterwards I saw the lance it reached from the floor to the ceiling of his cottage and for years to come in the village of Rouville it will be the centre-piece of a thrilling tale. Other peasants joined my friendly gravedigger, and one of them the giant of his village told me of his own escape from death. He was acting as the guide of four British officers through a part of the forest.
Hamlet says, in the scene with the Gravedigger, "By the Lord, Horatio, these three years I have taken note of it: the age is grown so picked, that the toe of the peasant comes so near the heel of the courtier, he galls his kibe." And Lorenzo, in the Merchant of Venice, alluding to Launcelot: O dear discretion, how his words are suited!
Doubtless the chaplain and the gravedigger the one throwing on the coffin some verses of Scripture, the other some clods of earth. The muttering ceased; the heavy sounds ceased. A movement was made. The torches shone. The wapentake reappeared, holding high his weapon, under the reopened gate of the cemetery; then the chaplain with his book, and the gravedigger with his spade.
A few days before, the gravedigger, while digging up the whitened bones of the ancient dead, had broken up with his pick-axe a mouldering coffin, and a head rolled to his feet It was of later date, for the lower jaw was still fastened to it and it had not the calcareous colour of bones buried long ago. It was the more horrible.
Still weeping, he said to a gravedigger, 'Well! and the coffin? 'You were right, answered the man; 'I found it in the second row of the other grave. It had the figure of a cross on it, formed by seven black nails. But how could you know the place and the mark? 'Alas! it is no matter, replied the old Jew, with bitter melancholy. 'You see that I was but too well informed on the subject.
If my old father dies first, I shall say to the gravedigger, 'Dig a big hole, sexton, for my mother will lie there too." "Ah! heart of me!" cried Riekje, clasping her husband in her arms, "I shall say the same thing to the sexton if you die first, my Dolf." The fire roared in the stove, and the candles, which were nearly burned down, gave a flickering light.
First Gravedigger, says he; 'I will come again before long, and make you an extended visit. In less than a year the hearse brought him. That's his grave push that ivy away and you can read the inscription. Did you ever hear of him?" It was a plain, heavy slab placed horizontally, and the ivy had so run over it that the white of the marble was nearly obscured.
Only the very poor people seem to be buried in the common earth, in the open spaces which lie before the colonnades, and these are crowded. It rather shocked us to see the gravedigger remove some bones from the ground and throw them into a kind of bin, which was there for the purpose, in order to make room for a new corpse. I thought, with Hamlet
The whole scene is full of allusions, easily explainable from the point of view we have indicated. It was probably no small number of men that took delight in the French essayist. No doubt, the jest of the gravedigger is directed against them, when he says that if the mad Hamlet does not recover his wits in England, it is no great matter there, because there the men are as mad as he.
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